Sales Model

Once you are familiar with possible sales models in OSS/BSS, it is the same time to analyze which services of your application and how you are going to offer through service providers to their customers.

Sales Components

When presenting an application on the market, an ISV defines it as a single service or a set of services and possibly subservices. It is important to identify which of them the ISV wants to sell.

Consider the following simple examples when making decision on the list of services that you are going to sell.

Multi-Tenant Unlimited Service

Suppose there is a cloud application providing a single service with unlimited resource usage for each tenant. For example, an organization uses the acquired tenant to get access to all application resources, such as legal documents, or technical standards, or online movies.

In this case, a service provider can sell the single service, for example, called tenant, that allows customers to access the cloud resources.

Cloud Servers

A cloud system provides virtual private servers (VPSes) with limits on resource usage. Depending on the system capabilities, a provider can sell the following services.

• VPS management service that allows a customer to create and manage VPSes using resources limited by the subscription.

• VPS subservice with the following possible use of them:

  • VPSes can be shared for the company

  • VPSes can be assigned to service users

• VPS offers are references to VPS limits pre-configured by the provider.

• Resource usage - total resource usage, for example, disk space, RAM, CPU power.

Backup Application

A cloud backup system allows its customers to backup servers and personal systems. A customer is able to backup the servers belonged to the company as well as provide access to the backup service for the company’s staff to backup the computers they use. A provider can think of selling the following components:

• Tenant - access for a customer to the backup cloud services

• Storage - total use of the cloud storage containing a customer’s backups

• Server backup - total number of servers to backup periodically

• User - total number of users that can backup their personal systems

Design Sales Models

Check-List

When designing a sales model think of the following data you need to collect and analyze:

• Sales Components

• Sales channels - direct and/or through resellers

• Trials - time-limited or feature-limited (freemium) service

• Service pause/resume - whether a provider can stop a service for a customer and a customer can stop a subservice

• Integration with other applications (required or optional), for example, DNS, anti-virus, or anti-spam

Typical Sales Models

The sales model for your application can be a Combining Sales Models:

• Service with fixed price

• Add-on service

• Pay-as-you-go service

Design Process

Look through the list of services you are going to provide and for each of them consider the following:

1. Is it possible to sell the service on the add-on basis?

   • If not, use the fixed price, maybe zero price.

   • If yes, consider the following alternative ways:

     • Use the add-on sales method, where customers can select resource limitation.

     • Use the pay-as-you-go method, where resource usage is unlimited and the system will charge customers at the end of each billing period for the actual resource usage.

2. Is it required or possible to assign the service to a service user?

   For example, total resource usage is not assigned to a service user, but rather accounted for the customer, as an organization.

3. Does the service require a DNS zone or a DNS record assigned to it?

4. If you allow trial subscriptions, will they include this service?

   If yes, what will be the limit on it?

5. Will it be possible to pause and resume the service?

6. Is it required or possible to integrate the service with another application?

Write down the results into a table similar to this:

APP SERVICE	Sales method	Assign to users	DNS	Trial	Pause/resume	Other app	Description
VPS Management	Zero price	-	DNS zone	Yes	Yes	-	Main singleton service (subscription service) linked with other services in a subscription
VPS	add-on	Yes	A record	Limited	Yes	- Backup service - Anti-virus - Site-builder	Virtual private server that a customer admin can assign to an end-user. A VPS provides resources limited by an offer linked with it.
Offer	add-on	-	-	-	-	-	A service profile with limits that a VPS based on the offer cannot exceed.
Storage	pay-as-you-go	-	-	Limited	-	-	Total disk space usage in GB.

Decide if cross-sell is needed or maybe just possible. For example, a mail server needs to bind to one or more domains. In a bound domain an MX record must refer to this mail server. Another example - a subscriber needs a separate domain to assign A records for each VPS in it. For this reason, your sales model may require cross-sell of service plans from a domain registration sales category.

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